Analog Dictionaries Still Kick You Know What

Hey friends,

My partner and I have a weird inside joke between us where I’ll use a nasally voice with ample vocal fry to say “when I studied at the University of Oxford,” in much the same way that Gretchen Weiners from Mean Girls says “my father, the inventor of Toaster Strudel.” 

Because let’s be real… starting a story by stating that you studied at Oxford lends itself to a certain sense of annoying self-righteousness. 

And yet, I want to tell you a little story from my time studying at the University of Oxford. 

There are many I could pick from, including everything from semi-unhinged classmates to sober lesbian bartenders to a falcon decapitating a pigeon in front of visiting dignitaries. Instead, what I want to focus on is something one of our professors– or tutors, as they referred to themselves– told us about her journey to becoming a scholar of Old English language and literature. 

She explained that when she was an undergraduate student, she took a course on the history of English literature, and one of their first big tasks of the term was to translate the opening pages of Beowulf. Like most college students (sorry, uni students, oi oi), she put off the assignment until a few days before it was due, and then she hurried to the library to hunt down all the reference texts she could find, piecing together Beowulf line by line, drawing upon multiple sources and having to navigate conflicting discussions of Old English grammar and definitions. 

By the time she’d translated the passage in question, she’d spent most of the night in the library and was exhausted. But, she’d done it. 

It was only when she went to class and turned in the work that she realized most of her classmates had had an easier time. Beowulf is perhaps the most famous surviving piece of Old English literature. It has been translated and retranslated hundreds of times over the years. Coming up with a translation didn’t require hours hunched over an archaic book of grammar. It could be done with a simple Google search and some copy-and-paste, which is how most of her classmates tackled the assignment. 

At first, I’m sure she felt silly. All that time and effort for something that could have been so quick and easy if she’d just opened her computer. 

But as the term progressed, something became abundantly clear: she understood Old English poetry and literature better than her classmates. Whether it was a text in the original language or a piece that had been translated to modern English, she was equipped to dissect it in a way that others weren’t. 

From there, she was hooked, and her scholarship in Old English took off. 

I wish I could remember her name so that I could reach out to her… maybe I’ll follow in her classmates’ footsteps and do some Googling later. 

Regardless, I share her story not simply to have a reason to remind you that I studied at Oxford (after all, it was a summer term with a much higher acceptance rate than actual degree-seeking students encounter), but because her lesson has been on my mind recently. 

In an effort to be less tech-dependent, avoid distractions, and keep my critical-thinking faculties intact, I purchased a large dictionary and a thesaurus to keep on my writing desk. When I write, I often find myself wondering, “Am I using that word correctly?” or “What’s another way I could say this so that I don’t use the word liminal three times in a single paragraph?” Typically, I just turn to Google. But, when I do, it’s incredibly easy to then just click into another tab and head over to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or YouTube. Then, an hour or two will pass, and I’m no further along in my writing than I’d wanted to be. 

While using a dictionary and a thesaurus for the language I speak natively isn’t nearly as impressive as what my tutor was able to do with deciphering Old English, I find that her lesson resonates with me deeply when I opt to do something by hand rather than outsourcing my thinking to technology. It’s not just that I find the answer I’m looking for or am able to make better word choices– it’s also that I feel like deepening my own mastery of the language and committing more and more vocabulary to memory. 

Having just used an “It’s not this, it’s that” sentence structure (if you know, you know), AI also comes to mind here. I think AI is here to stay and has some positive applications, but when it comes to writing– any craft, really– I fear what will come for writers and their mastery of language. With a few instructions, anyone can produce a passable piece of writing, and in doing so, they learn nothing. Writing is thinking. It’s a process. It’s a skill. It’s something that takes time to hone and refine until you find your unique voice. 

But it’s also hard. And time-consuming. And sometimes it’s outright stressful. 

And if my own tech addiction has taught me anything, it’s that when life is overwhelming, busy, and stressful, that’s when using tech for distracted efficiency happens almost on autopilot. And when isn’t life overwhelming, busy, and stressful? 

I worry that we’re heading to a place where folks will still have the desire to create, but not the willingness to do the hard thing and invest the time and energy necessary to nurture their creativity, opting instead to outsource those efforts wholesale to AI. It’s a fear I have for myself as much as for our literary culture as a whole. My job requires a lot of interaction with AI, and I’ve already outsourced a considerable amount of my career thinking to Claude. First passes at product strategies, condensing memos to one-pagers, summarizing and collating meeting notes and customer feedback… all things I’ve done by hand up until a year ago are now knocked out in seconds by a machine learning model, freeing me up to focus more on crafting a vision and leading my team. At times, it’s exciting, and when I’m feeling particularly burnt out, it’s so easy to just tap my keyboard a few times and let Claude do the bulk of my job for me, even if it means I know I’ll have considerable amounts of editing and revising to do the following day when I’ve accidentally shared out a write-up with impossible technical architecture scoped out or a KPI tracking plan that makes no sense with our existing infrastructure. 

The temptation to do the same in my fiction when I’m feeling stuck or unsure about how to proceed is very real, and I have to actively remind myself that doing the hard thing is worth it because it’s rewarding, and because things won’t get any easier if I don’t hone the skills needed to make creative efforts as simple as engaging muscle memory, which is what i’m working toward. 

That’s why I’m spending more time this week being intentional about asking myself what I can do by hand that I would normally outsource to my technology. It’s an exercise in reclaiming my creativity that I kicked off almost by accident when I turned to my dictionary during my writing time this past weekend. If you’ll indulge me in a convoluted metaphor, I’m not trying to copy and paste someone else’s translation of Beowulf; I’m trying to get to the point where my translation is good enough to be copied by hungover college students. 

The book is not about the annual 1000-word event. Instead, it is a collection of concise personal essays and reflections on creativity penned by more than fifty writers. It’s not a regurgitation of the same writing advice we’ve heard a dozen times. It’s writers sitting down and talking about their own writing journeys, including the parts that suck or which they’ve struggled with. But through it all is a celebration of the writing life and what it means to be a writer. I’m particularly fond of Roxanne Gay’s essay in the first section of the book, and highly advise giving it a read. 

Since I referenced Beowulf quite a bit in today’s entry, I wanted to provide a brief excerpt of the original text, alongside a translation and some commentary. I won’t translate by hand (as I no longer have access to the Bodleian library, you know, the library at the University of Oxford… where I was a student…), so please forgive me if that’s what you were expecting. 

I recommend going with Seamus Heaney or Francis B. Gummare’s translation of the text, as both are widely read and cited, but there’s also a translation and commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien that’s quite good as well. 

Beowulf isn’t an easy read for modern readers, even in translation, because it uses an ancient form of alliterative verse. Old English also incorporated grammatical structures that would be odd or, at times, incomprehensible in modern English. 

Still, once you start to read it and get into it, you’ll see how many of the archetypes that influence storytelling today were already present at the time of Beowulf’s composition– noble heroes set on a journey to defeat a great evil, fetch legendary weapons, and overcome challenges that would defeat lesser champions. 

You may also see some interesting parallels to one of my favorite video games of all time, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 

High Hrothgar, the character Wulfgar, the Companions, Thrisk Mead Hall, and Ragnar the Red all harken back to themes, characters, and scenes from Beowulf. In fact, Ragnar the Red is a great reference for modern audiences when it comes to understanding the alliterative verse structure used in Beowulf! 

The more you know. 

Toodles,

Blake